An intricate procedure was successfully completed by surgeons at Delhi’s Ganga Ram hospital to remove a ‘coconut-sized’ tumour from a patient’s thyroid gland. The patient was from the Begusarai region of Bihar.
According to a statement from the hospital, the patient, farmer Raghubir, had been having breathing and swallowing issues for the previous six months.
The issue became worse over time and the thyroid tumour grew in size. Following this, Raghubir was sent to an ENT, at Head, Neck Onco Surgery Department at Delhi’s Ganga Ram Hospital.
According to Dr Sangeet Agarwal, consultant, Head and Neck Onco Surgery at the hospital, ‘During the last so many years of practice, I have operated more than 250 such cases of huge thyroid tumors but this was a unique case in terms of weight and size, wherein the normal butterfly-shaped thyroid gland, which normally weighs 10-15 gm and is of 3-4 cm size, became larger than a coconut with a size of 18-20 cm.’
The major issue in this surgery was keeping the patient’s voice. There were other difficulties as well. He added that extra care was taken to prevent puncturing of blood vessels, and that the bilateral vocal cord nerves were successfully spared.
The doctor said that because the trachea (wind pipe) was squeezed, a unique approach for anaesthesia had to be used. Preservation of calcium and preserving parathyroid glands were also significant challenges in these kinds of massive tumours.
We were able to safely preserve all 4 parathyroid glands throughout the roughly three-hour procedure, he added.
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